What's the best question - and verb - you ever received?

Supposing there's an art and practice to asking, reflecting on beautiful questions?

There once was a young poet who wrote letters to an older, somewhat wiser poet. Handwritten letters, not typed, not texted, but inked and mailed for the slow journey in an envelope. In one of those letters, the elder poet (his name was Rainer Maria Rilke) wrote, "In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life..."

He continued, “Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own...”

Rilke kept writing, "If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees [...] then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge."

DETOUR: I love the word astonished. Have you ever noticed that astonishing is an adjective, like some THING is labeled astonishing. The noun astonish is almost as fun: "you never fail to astonish me" reports the dictionary. But try making it a verb, an action word, like try saying, "I am astonishing today and it's going to be so much fun!"] Like the incredible small and amazing sand dollar in the image below is absolutely astonishing!!

“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”

What some people didn’t notice is how Rilke’s next sentences suggested ways of being (you might say ‘doing’ but I love the verbing language of being with -ing words:

“Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that — but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself.”

What’s the mark of a really good question? The kind of question that really gets your innermost self imagining and reflecting on your self-awareness? Let's call them "open, honest questions", or "beautiful questions," the kind whose answer you can't possibly know in advance. Not leading questions. Not yes/no questions. But reflections that go to the heart with answers for living into.

Asking and reflecting on beautiful questions is an art that takes courage and practice. I wrote about how leaders are asking open, honest questions (among other touchstones and practices) in The Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity, for the Center for Courage & Renewal (Berrett-Koehler, 2018).

Supposing you could receive some open, honest questions?

Here’s a fun way to practice: with the Supposing: Reflections for Accessing Your Wise Inner Artist — a 63-card deck featuring the Emotikin, inviting you into inner landscapes from seaside to mountains and more.  Get creative pretending you’re in the picture itself, playing with the word on each card as a way of being (creative), and pondering the open, honest questions as journaling prompts or reflections for/from your own inner artist.

I recently ordered a small print run of a physical deck ($44 plus shipping) get details here. Or you can play on the amazing Deckible app ($14.99), for phone or tablet, where these cards (and almost 600 other decks) can become part of your daily journaling and/or meditation practice: https://bit.ly/SpzingDk

Enjoy this one-minute video for a preview!